Although Anne Dicker, the insurgent 1st District candidate backed by Progressive Philadelphia, has associated herself with the Obama campaign, I would encourage other Hillary people to 'break ranks' and vote for Anne over John "Johnny Doc" Dougherty.

I do not think Dougherty and Vince Fumo have any congruency as far as corruption and I believe that Johnny Doc will be an advocate for Philadelphia schools in Harrisburg.

However, Philadelphia schools have had plenty of advocates over the years who never listened carefully to parent and student constituencies at these schools. Dicker is someone who will listen and learn before taking up the cause.

Another major issue affecting the 1st District is top-down development. Dicker has expressed an interest in managing development in a way that will make it beneficial to the North Philadelphia Latino community. Her campaign reached out to this community early on but because of money and manpower, they did not have the resources to build formal relationships.

Development creeping up from Old City is not only important to the economic welfare of Phildelphia in terms of creating a wider upper-middle and middle class tax base, it is also important as far as creating jobs for North Philadelphia where unemployment still hovers around 50%.

In the long term, I believe that North Philadelphia, through public transportation nodes, I-95 and mixed income, market rate housing, (not to be confused with speculation rate housing) can become the most viable economic corridor between the city and Bucks County, providing two nodes of job creation on either side of the corridor that will serve average residents with average and below average incomes.

Dicker is someone who gets this and through her anti-casino activism, has been advocating for smarter development plans, plans with a vision instead of stop-gap solutions such as slap-dash tax abatements.

At minimum, when an insurgent candidate comes in closer to the machine champ, the insurgent issues must be co-oped to an extent by the winning campaign or the winner risks losing in the next election when the outsiders can build more of a mass following.

Somehow, this model still seems silly to national figures looking at the political scene but this is, in fact, how Barack Obama won the senatorial race in Illinois. Obama is backed by Congressman Luis Gutierrez. Over the years, as Chicago faced the same issues with displacement of the city's poor and middle class (which that city had/has and Philly doesn't) people in the Puerto Rican community around Gutierrez built repeated campaigns to break the power of the Chicago aldermanic machine. These campaigns were run by a coalition of Latinos and progressive whites and provided a good amount of the on-the-ground experience for people who eventually went to Obama's senatorial camapign and into the cultural mass that built the Obama presidential run.

With every loss, the insurgent got closer to the machine in numbers and City Hall needed to pay more and more attention to the grassroots voices of the community.

I will admit that many of those insurgent voices from Chicago have been co-opted, which is also a natural and necessary process.

I am even more fearful of top-down development in Philadelphia. Grassroots business people in Philadelphia are rebuilding the economy the right way, by bringing in businesses that bridge commodity and experience provider products that are, in my mind, the new model for building a city upon small manufacturing. For deep wonky types who know about economic development issues, these individuals will recognize the small manufacturing strategy as a key stabilization strategy that was used in Chicago to stabilize the working class there and provide jobs in semi-skilled and unskilled labor.

Anne Dicker, to me, is the representative voice of this important independent business community that is beginning to include North Philadelphia Latinos who are opening up a higher rate of small businesses. This organic community is threatened by top down development in the city. Coalitions coming from this community have been key in building innovative social programs in Philadelphia and in forging school reform because they have formed partnerships where 'urban pioneers' in the city have fought for better schools, side by side with Latinos.

The non-privatizing of children from the majority white relocate population is an important development in education reform that has largely been off the radar. The Clinton administration had a great deal to do with supporting reformers in Philadelphia non-profits. In my mind, Clinton people should also look to Dicker as representing an extension of this legacy and not vote with a mindset of "Clinton vs. Obama" ticket.

Even if Dicker loses, the vote in this State Senate district needs to reflect changing configurations. As someone working with North Philadelphia Latino youth (and hopefully later, poor white youth as well), enfranchising them into the changes underway in Philadelphia, I believe I need the constituency represented through Dicker to have some formalized power in the city.

I believe that if one asked Mayor Michael Nutter, off the record, if this assessment was right, he would say the same things I was saying.

Separate your candidates from the presidential camps and vote very locally on April 22nd.

There's more...

As I was walking to the Drexel Campus from work at a North Philadelphia non-profit on the last day of voter registration here, I ran into volunteers from the Obama campaign who I knew from Progressive Philadelphia. They were sparse and uninspired.

There is a lot of talk on the blogs about super delegates and other obvious factors in the close of primary season. However, no matter how much Joe Trippi and the Obama campaign has done to bring elections to the internet, I would argue that elections are still won on the ground. One important factor in getting out the vote that has not been talked about on Mydd much or any other blog are local non-profits. Seeing a lack of influence in this sector is largely because blogs are filled with people who were not politically engaged before the rise of the internet. Furthermore, these people have just gotten in the trenches.

Let me explain from the point of view of the 2004 election and how that worked in Kerry winning Wisconsin. I was in Madison at the time, spending most of my time with a woman whose father, like mine, had been a local activist and whose family had been involved with the Democratic Party since the 1960's. Here father was famous for throwing water in Tommy Thompson's face when he was asked to sit on a state education board. She worked for the University of Wisconsin System and slipped me lots of information about UW Madison faking the reporting of it's efforts for minority recruitment and retention.

She and I both met with Barack Obama in 2005 about the problem of rising costs in education and minority graduation rates falling because of rising costs. We also talked about the middle class getting squeezed by tuition costs as well.

In 2004, those of us who had been local activists and had worked on reform campaigns 'back home' were getting pretty irate with the Dean worshipers. We basically felt that the Deaniacs represented a certain liberal stereotype that turned people away from liberalism and the Democratic Party. We also resented the fact that many of these people had not been engaged before, in the trenches as it were, and were now telling those of us who had that we were some sort of establishment wall of shill. These people began to trickle into Kerry's campaign office to volunteer. Then, the head of Students for Kerry, Mike Pfhol (sp) began to directly exploit that sentiment to recruit latent Democrats -- those of us who were involved outside of Madison -- to the Kerry effort.

One of the reasons resentment began to curdle among the so-called old guard, (if you can call people under 30 as such), was because many Deaniacs began to take on a certain nasty tenor in their anti-war stance. We began to see things like ROTC enlistees on campus getting yelled at, signs denouncing the troops and finally, a jar of urine was thrown at a group of Young Republicans. We were so sick of these types representing 'us liberals' in the public eye, that many of us jumped to volunteer for Kerry's campaign to squash Dean. There were so many of us that came on board that when the convention for College Democrats came in Ripon, the Madison contingent filled up an entire two floor hotel.

Non-profits will play a similar role in Pennsylvania, especially Philadelphia. Hillary Clinton has a long-standing relationship with many of these non-profits which receive federal funding. While non-profits cannot explicitly endorse a candidate, their employees most certainly work on Get out the Vote Efforts. Many of the management level workers whose programing will rely on Federal funding and policy agendas wait it out before they throw their outside of work efforts behind a candidate. This is because we need to get a theater with the person who is most likely to win.

In the 1st District PA Senate race, John Doughrty has used this tactic against Anne Dicker. The type of presence Doughrty has established gives the impression that one has to back him or we will be shut out when it comes time to get the ear of our elected officials.

Many of the established non-profits have already lined up behind Hillary because of relationships but also because she has spelled out her agenda more clearly and to non-profits, (which make up 7% of the total U.S. economy, to understand the scale of this weight), the subtext of the Hillary agenda says 'funding.'

One of the reasons, the Obama campaign has not courted these traditional circles is many of his backers in Chicago have been successful in building non-traditional non-profit structures which are -- and not to back a candidate -- better models. Quite frankly, these are models I plan to replicate. The other reason is some non-profits are repositories for the political class within the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign has set out to break these particular cogs in the machine.

The truth of the matter is a president must form policy as he or she goes along, as the climate dictates. Obama seems to know this and he seems to want to avoid creating an agenda that will amount to lies. A particular agenda in May of 2008 might not be the best or most realistic agenda in May of 2009 to bring before the House and the Senate. At the same time, those people who know the finer points of policy would be more inclined to vote for Obama if he had a better Blueprint.

When the Obama campaign came to Philadelphia, they focused their attention on students who had been working for the campaign in different capacities. They needed to bring in more on the ground people from the neighborhoods. Large numbers of Philadelphia residents who have been shut out from the political process by bad machine politics would have jumped on the Obama bandwagon. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign never seemed to realize that they had seasoned organizers -- Saul Alinsky foundation trained organizers like myself -- in the midst of their upstarts. Meanwhile, the last two weeks of voter registration coincided with spring break at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel. UPenn was where Obama had the largest number of student organizers.

The groudswell of students Obama brought into the process is wonderful. I plan to eventually tap into this group and find someone who can run as a college student voice on Philadelphia City Council for the West Philly and Temple areas. We tend to forget how many students are self-funded, like myself, and therefore poor. I think a student voice representing as a councilperson-at-large would also be another voice for Philadelphia's poor. (No, this is not a pitch to run myself.) However, the campaign failed to ignite longtime activists whose history in the City that Loves You Back predated Progressive Philly. In that, Obama's campaign left a lot of free radicals and lost registration organizers in the crucial last weeks.

People in charge of programs at non-profits tend to be very passionate about their area of expertise. This is a passion which breeds necessity when it comes to quiet political alignments. Getting in front of a candidate before they are in office can make a world of difference for those particular non-profit programs. In an ideal world, (which too many Deaniacs and Obamabots believe they live in because they come from upper class backgrounds and have never been in survival mode), non-profit programming and policy wonks would not have such tunnel vision. We would be tying global warming to solutions for giving inner city residents jobs. Unfortunately, fighting for that type of broad vision means tilting wind mails; when one works with the poor, there is no time for that. (I believe Republicans understand that so they do things to put those of us in the trenches on the defense instead of the offense.)

These are the sort of on the ground factors that tilt the race for more established politicians.

One of the big failures of Barack Obama himself is that he has not advertised the great successes that have happened in the areas he worked as an organizer, among his core group of supporters. I know because I went to a high school which benefited from the direct result of Barack Obama's organizing in the area.

Thornwood High School in South Holland, where I attended as an out of district student (coming in illegally from the City of Chicago) has the following statistics: 75% African-American, 38% of students below the poverty line and a 96% graduation rate tracking students from freshman entry to senior graduation. One of the goals of the school now is to reach 50% student matriculation into 4 year colleges. Every year, they get closer to that goal. What majority African-American school can boast those statistics? Obama did a great deal of organizing in South Holland when it was going through white flight to keep a racial balance and keep support of the school district strong as the town underwent demographic changes.

There are many stories like this on the South Side that the Obama campaign has failed to tell and have a direct relation to policy. I believe he would be just as good as Hillary in this area. However, when others read the subtext of funding in the Hillary agenda, they can't afford to think so openly. I wonder if can either, sometimes.

It makes me happy that I can't do work on campaigns anymore.

There's more...

Anne Dicker and the Philly for Change Pluppeteers have a message for you:

Philadelphia is in serious danger.

Within a year, we could have two big fat slots parlors on the Delaware.

Thousands of extra cars pouring in from New Jersey every day.

• Pawnshops.
  
• SUVs.
  
• Air pollution.
  
• Road rage nastiness (one of the sites is right next to Home Depot/Walmart.)

Queen Village or Northern Libs could turn into strip malls.

THE STANDARD TAP WILL PROBABLY CLOSE.

So to educate the public and present a possible alternative future -

Philly for Change presents a dramatic sock puppet show!

Watch here:

Windows Media:
http://www.pfcvotes.com/casinos_anne.wmv

Quicktime:
http://www.pfcvotes.com/Pluppets%20Anne% 20small.mov

There's more...

Yo Philly:

In the buildup to next week's elections, Young Philly Politics, the blog aimed at young and young-at-heart progressives is having a Happy Hour/Party/Candidate Meet and Greet.  The night will be a chance to have fun, see each other face to face, meet other progressives, and hear from three candidates that need and deserve the support of the progressive community. We had somewhere in the range of 75 people at the last Happy Hour, and with our co-sponsor, Philly for Change, and I expect we will have even more for this one.

The three candidates that we have chosen to strongly support, for a number of reasons are: Valerie McDonald-Roberts for Lt. Governor, Anne Dicker for State Rep., and Tony Payton for State Rep.  Invite whomever, show up, have fun, party with other progressives, and learn how you can help make the difference over the final few days!

The Details: TONIGHT, May 12th, from 5:30 to 8:30 PM at the Khyber (upstairs), 56 S. 2nd St, in Old City.

In the extended entry, a quick look at three future progressive stars of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party:

The last party was a lot of fun. This one will be as well, as we hear from the rising stars of the progressive PA community.

There's more...

Terry Graboyes, who touts herself as a liberal in her campaign for Pennsylvania state representative, has given $7,000 to republicans in the state government over the past six years.  Graboyes' campaign contributions, which are detailed by Ray Murphy of Young Philly Politics, included $3,000 to House Speaker John Perzel.

For progressives in Pennsylvania, Perzel has been public enemy No. 1, consistently voting against increases in school funding and other social services.  Perzel, who represents Northeast Philadelphia, has also led an effort to systematically destroy the City's ability to self-govern.  Perzel led a state takeover of the City's public schools and parking authority.  He has blocked the City from enforcing local restrictions on handguns and local ordinances on casino development.

Graboyes, a former lobbyist who owns her own window company, is running for state representative in Pennsylvania's 175th District against real estate developer Mike O'Brien and grassroots organizer Anne Dicker.  The 175th District runs along the Delaware River in Philadelphia from Port Richmond and Fishtown to Queen Village and Pennsport.

There's more...